Texas Instruments Inc is today expected to move beyond the 80486-compatible microprocessors designed by Cyrix Corp, which it makes for Cyrix and for sale under its own name, and will launch its first two in-house-designed parts, the Wall Street Journal reported. They will be low-power parts designed for notebooks and sub-notebooks. Texas, which is said to be developing parts to compete with Intel’s Pentium, reckons that its comprehensive patent cross-licence agreement with Intel protects it from any litigation Intel might bring, provided its microcode is clean and does not infringe Intel copyrights. The hotter of the two properties is the TI486SXLC, which is aimed at subnotebooks, is about half the size of Intel’s competing chip and uses less power.The Texas devices will still use a microprocessor core from Cyrix, and Texas will continue to pay Cyrix a royalty. Meantime Intel’s Intel Inside logo has quickly spawned copies: Cyrix is pushing Cyrix Instead stickers, and the advertisements for Amstrad’s new PC7486 SLC33, which uses a 33MHz chip made by Texas Instruments, carry a box that combines the Texas Instruments logo with 486 and an in action flash. The Amstrad machine costs UKP730 with 2Mb CPU, 512Kb video RAM and a 130Mb disk, with MS-DOS 6 and Windows 3.1 already loaded.
